I went around the block. When I came by the first time, he ignored me: he was talking to somebody behind a door. When I came by the second time, he was standing on the porch, and he waved me into a puddle that marked a parking strip.

ON THE porch, John said, “He’s got our names.”

“What?”

“I told him my name was John and he asked me if I knew a Mr. Kidd.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I put my hands to my forehead: this was not good. An outsider knew who we were. What else did he know?

“Come on in,” John said. He pulled open the door and we stepped inside, John in the lead. A black guy, probably forty years old, was standing in the middle of a small, tidy living room. There was no television, but there were a dozen or so old-fashioned mahogany-cased radios, RCAs and Motorolas and other names I didn’t recognize, that must have come from the thirties and forties. They were all polished and neatly kept, and one showed glowing lights behind a wide glass face. Radios with tubes, for Christ’s sake. The place smelled of furniture polish.

John was saying, “Mr. Baird, this is Kidd.”

Baird looked at me doubtfully, then said to John, “He’s a white man.”

John looked at me carefully. “No shit? I just thought he was passing.”

Baird looked at me for a moment-my hair’s not quite blond-and then laughed, scratched his ass, and said, “You boys want some beer? It’s been a bad day.”

He got three bottles of Budweiser and a bag of nacho-cheese chips from the kitchen, passed them around, and dropped into a tattered but comfortable-looking green chair. John and I settled onto a sagging couch, facing him; the beer tasted good after the long ride. An overweight black-and-white cat came out of the kitchen, hopped up on the arm of Baird’s chair, stretched out, and looked at us.

“Bobby told me that if anything bad ever happened to him, that you two might come snooping around. I was supposed to tell you whatever I could and he told me not to mention you to anybody else. Like the police.”

“I hope to God…” John began.

“So I didn’t. I didn’t even remember that you was supposed to come snooping until you got on my door and said you was John,” he said. “So what can I do for you? You know anything about this mess?”

“You don’t have Bobby’s laptop, by any chance?” I asked.

“No. The FBIs said that the computer equipment was gone. You boys are computer experts, right?”

“I don’t know a disk drive from a joystick, but Kidd is pretty familiar with them,” John said.

Baird nodded and focused on me. “Okay. Well, Bobby had one IBM laptop and about a hundred DVDs hidden away somewhere, but I don’t know where.”

“A hundred?” I asked. “You know that the number was a hundred?”

Baird’s forehead wrinkled. “No, I don’t know the real number. He had a whole shitload of them, though.”

“You know what was on them?”

“He called them his archives. He had his active things on the computer and his archives on the disks.”

“So there was stuff on the computer that wasn’t on the disks,” I said.

“Yeah, and vice versa. As I understood it. The FBIs went all through his house yesterday and today, they took every scrap of paper. They found a safe-deposit-box key and had to get me to okay that they open it-I’m Bobby’s executor for his will-but all they found in the box was old pictures and his mama’s diaries from when she moved down here from Nashville, and two old gold chains.”

“So what, uh, is gonna happen to the house?” John asked.

“I sell it. After funeral expenses and bills, the money goes to the United Negro College Fund. He told me I could keep the money from the yard sale, the furniture and all, and said I could keep any cash I find, but he was just jokin’. The FBIs said there weren’t no cash, but that’s all right with me. I’m just sad to see him go. He was the smartest man I ever met.”

“He might’ve been the smartest man, period,” I said. “Do you have any idea of what might have happened?”

He started shaking his head halfway through the question. “If the FBIs are right about the time he was killed, then I saw him two hours before that and he was happy as a clam.”

“Bobby had good security,” I said. “People have been looking for him for a long time. The question is, how did they find him now? Did he change anything recently? Get any phone calls or talk to anyone in person?”

Again, he started shaking his head early. “He didn’t get around much, anymore. I’d take him around to the stores when he wanted to go, but he got tired real easy. He had his computers and his movies and his music. He played the piano, some blues and some fancy stuff. He was a good piano player one time, but he was starting to lose the coordination in his left hand, and it made him sad. I saw him crying about it, once. He didn’t go out much. He never talked to anyone, ’cept maybe a neighbor or on the computer. ’Course, I wasn’t there to see if he used the phone.”

“Goddamnit,” I said to John.

John said to Baird, “If you have a few minutes, let’s go back through the last month or so…”

John talked him through the past two months. Two weeks in, Baird remembered one anomaly in Bobby’s behavior, a tiny thing. Bobby had been interested in helping smart, underprivileged black schoolkids get involved with computers. I knew for sure of one case-the case that had brought John, LuEllen, and me to Longstreet for the first time, when John had met Marvel. There had been other instances that I’d heard about, as rumor, anyway, from friends on the ’net.

The latest case, Baird said, came when Bobby heard of a kid in New Orleans, a hot little code writer who had actually broken into her grade school to get machine time, because she didn’t have a machine of her own. Bobby had talked to her online a few times, Baird said, and then had sent her a laptop.

Or, Baird said, what Bobby had actually done was send Baird to the local CompUSA to buy a laptop with cash. He then put some additional software on it and had Baird FedEx it to the girl. Baird paid cash at FedEx. Bobby always had Baird front for him when physical packages had to be sent somewhere, so there’d be no deliveries-no invoices-that would tie to him.

“When you FedEx’ed it, whose return address did you put on it?” I asked.

Baird looked at me for a moment, then said, “Mine. The computer was worth two thousand dollars, and if it got lost… the insurance, you know.”

“You didn’t see anybody around, there was no chance you were followed? Nobody came to talk to you?”

Baird said, “Nobody talked to me. I didn’t see nobody. But I… wasn’t looking. You think somebody followed me?”

“How often did you go to Bobby’s?”

“Every day. I mean, I was his caregiver. I did the shopping and cut the grass.”

We went forward day by day, and a week or maybe ten days after he sent the laptop-Baird didn’t have a good grip on the relative time, but didn’t think it was too long-we tumbled over another anomaly.

“White boy came by selling Bibles and it turned out he liked old radios, too,” Baird said. “I been collecting these for years. I didn’t want no Bibles, but he asked if he could look at the radios and I let him in. That was pretty unusual.”

“Did he seem to know about the radios? Really know about them?”

“He knew a bit. Not so much about the value as how they worked. ’Course, the value changes all over the place. I was up in Memphis last year and found out that I have a radio-this one, it’s a 1938 Stewart-Warner tombstone”-he pointed at a tabletop radio with a burnished red-colored wooden case-“that baby’s worth six hundred dollars now. In Memphis, anyway. Down here, it’s probably fifty bucks at a garage sale. But he knew how the radios worked, okay. We talked for a while, looked at them for an hour, and then he left.”

“You ever leave him alone in here?” I asked.